Amerika

• Hong Kong’s Tiananmen Square statue removed

  The takeover becomes complete. China reveals that it has designs on empire, first by taking over everything near it so that it has a buffer zone, and next by making its gamble for the world. The buffer zone became a key pursuit in WW2: having a few hundred miles of defensive terrain around your nation causes enemies to rethink a costly invasion.

• How crowds can make bridges wobble and sway
  

  If enough people are crossing by foot, each walking at their own natural speed, they transfer so much energy into the bridge that it may start to oscillate. Then, as each individual walker adjusts their steps to try not to fall, they destabilize the bridge even more.

  Most errors seem to come in clusters, since the initial error creates chaos and people try chaotically to counteract it. The worst errors produce no results, and so people persist in digging themselves deeper into what will become their graves.

• Omicron could burn through the U.S. — and potentially hasten the Covid pandemic’s end

  As predicted, viruses act in an economy that rewards spreading widely enough to be able to circulate in perpetuity. That way, the virus stays alive; more accurately, whatever viruses mutate to the point that they can do this will persist while the others will die out with their victims. Now we have COVID-19, sniffles version, but the Democrats still have an election to steal, so the farce dies slowly.

• Australia settles lawsuit over welfare scheme criticised as racist
  

  Australia controversially requires welfare recipients to record job searches and other tasks in order to receive payments.

  Residents there have limited access to phone, internet and transport services. Many face additional language, cultural, education and health barriers.

  Another perpetual problem demands a non-solution in order to keep bureaucrats employed. If they are this poor and unable to do anything about it, let them live in the bushes, since that is what they are optimized to do.

• EU Parliament Takes First Step Towards a Fair and Interoperable Market
  

  On December 15, the European Parliament overwhelmingly approved important key changes to the EU Commission’s Digital Markets Act Proposal, including a prohibition on dark patterns and ambitious rules to help ensure interoperability of messaging and social media network services. The Parliament also added more options for users to switch default settings and apps.

  As usual, the cause hides behind the effect: we have Big Social because our taxes, legal costs, affirmative action, regulations, and government contracts make it too expensive to do business except as giant bloated corporations. Remove the stupid rules and get a healthier market. The centralized internet cannot route around damage.

• Reimagining Regulation for the Age of AI: New Zealand Pilot Project
  

  Without proper oversight, AI may replicate or even exacerbate human bias and discrimination, cause potential job displacement and lead to other unintended consequences. This is particularly problematic when AI is deployed in high-stakes domains such as criminal justice, healthcare, banking or employment.

  AIs operate on facts, therefore will discover things which are not politically correct, so we have to blame human bias and come up with billions of dollars of regulation to force AIs to come to the “correct” conclusions.

• Shortages Are Getting Worse As The Global Supply Chain Crisis Enters An Ominous New Chapter

  First unions, regulations, and taxes drove up our labor costs, then Lee Iaccoca figured out how to outsource parts manufacture abroad, and eventually all other industries followed. Now we see the high cost of having our supply chain coming from abroad and from foreign workers here, so globalism no longer looks like a solution.

• Nebraska’s quandary: Can it force more citizens to work?
  

  Unemployment rates are low in many places, and as the national rate fell to 4.2%, officials across the country are struggling to convince people who have stopped looking for work to seek jobs.

  Although this will not be popular with “muh jobs, Jesus,

• ‘Cancel culture’ risks wiping out comedy, claims Maureen Lipman
  

  “It’s a bit like laughter in church, something has to be forbidden to make you really laugh, to make you really belly laugh. It’s when you shouldn’t be laughing. And so, therefore, all the things that are being cancelled out are, I’m afraid, the things that have always made people laugh.”

  Ever wonder why movies, television, and books past the 1990s are generally both insipid and neurotic? Political correctness makes some topics unacceptable, leaving only the banal and Leftist dogma, which makes for a dying industry. Maybe another superhero film or remake will save them.

• In milestone deal, Proud Boy pleads guilty in Capitol riot
  

  Prosecutors allege Greene advanced past toppled police barricades and was at the front of a mob when police began using pepper spray and other crowd-control measures.. But prosecutors have said they don’t have any evidence that Greene entered the Capitol building that day.

  “After the riot, (Greene) engaged in conversations (on) encrypted messaging platforms admitting to his role in the riot, encouraging others not to give up in a fight to take back their country, and comparing the situation as it existed in the weeks following January 6 to a fourth-generation war,” prosecutors wrote in a June court filing.

  If only Antifa, election thieves, and various minority criminals faced this kind of “justice.”

• Criminals have stolen nearly $100 billion in Covid relief funds, Secret Service says

  When you hand out money, people are going to steal some of it. Even worse is that the whole pandemic has failed to stop deaths, even though those are less than normal for flu season, and has beeen a giant operation to get business dependent on and controlled by government. We are going to see decades of litigation, sort of like asbestos. The cost will be in the tens of trillions.

• Ancient DNA reveals the world’s oldest family tree

  Saner times would have titled this “Ancient DNA reveals oldest discovered family tree.”

  Although the right to use the tomb ran through patrilineal ties, the choice of whether individuals were buried in the north or south chambered area initially depended on the first-generation woman from whom they were descended, suggesting that these first-generation women were socially significant in the memories of this community.

  Instead of thinking matriarchy/patriarchy or matrilineal/patrilineal, it makes sense to recognize that ancients were more complex thinkers than we are, and they recognized complementary roles for the sexes.

~~~

• Durham tells court members of Clinton 2016 campaign under scrutiny

  As detailed in a series of posts, Trump knew the steal was coming and planned for it. He set some things in motion.

  First, he organized economic forces that sabotaged China’s plan to bootstrap their failing economy at our expense, starting a wave of disconnection across the West as companies saw what China was doing.

  Next, he managed to light a fire under the Clinton-controlled DOJ such that a lot of pedophiles are going to jail. Some kind of magic there.

  Finally, he set up a mechanism by which, once the election theft was proven, people would start going to jail.

  This took a lot longer than any of us could have anticipated, but the ending is going to be lit af.

• Refusing Vaccination Goes Against Christianity, Says Archbishop
  

  “It’s not about me and my rights to choose, it’s about how I love my neighbour. Vaccination reduces my chances — doesn’t eliminate — but it reduces my chances of getting ill and reducing my chances of getting ill, reduces my chances of infecting others,” Welby told ITV news on Tuesday evening.

  They — and there’s no specific group, just assorted sociopaths — will use your goodwill against you.

  The “love your neighbor” passage meant giving everything to God and nothing for Man. It is widely misinterpreted, but readers of syllogisms will recognize its form.

• People with IBD have more microplastics in their feces
  

  People with more severe IBD symptoms tended to have higher levels of fecal microplastics. Through a questionnaire, the researchers found that people in both groups who drank bottled water, ate takeaway food and were often exposed to dust had more microplastics in their feces.

  Modernity will kill you if you let it.

• Trump met with boos after revealing he received Covid-19 booster

  Was this a misstep? Perhaps. Every Republican since the 1960s at least has tried to signal being more mainstream than he is, and that is like watching an actor try to portray a character from a land he has never visited.

  In my view, he will correct course in time. His main riff on COVID-19 is not to fear it, but to find trusted medical professionals. That may work better if you are a billionaire than in an average American neighborhood.

  Then again, he also tried to save us from Obamacare.

• Solar flare throws light on ancient trade between the Islamic Middle East and the Viking Age
  

  “This result shows that the expansion of Afro-Eurasian trade networks, characterised by the arrival of large numbers of Middle Eastern beads, can be dated in Ribe with precision to 790±10 CE — coinciding with the beginning of the Viking Age. However, imports brought by ship from Norway were arriving as early as 750 CE,” says Professor Søren Sindbæk, who is also a member of the team.

  Contact with other tribes, even through trade, seems to bring about instability. Did the West sell itself for gold like the Manhattan Indians traded the island for beads?

• Two Common Over-the-Counter Compounds Reduce COVID-19 Virus Replication by 99% in Early Testing
  

  The combination includes diphenhydramine, an antihistamine used for allergy symptoms. When paired with lactoferrin, a protein found in cow and human milk, the compounds were found to hinder the SARS-CoV-2 virus during tests in monkey cells and human lung cells.

  When the panic fades, we find that this entire disaster could have been averted with Benadryl and a glass of milk.

  Then again, we primed ourselves for SARS panic after MERS.

• Trees are important for cleaner air in cities
  

  The results are clear: the pollutants in the leaves increased over time and the researchers could show a clear correlation between the level of air pollutants and the concentration of pollutants in the leaves.

  We could also focus simply on producing less pollution. In cities, driving golf carts instead of cars makes a lot of sense.

• Former US Army generals urge Pentagon to prepare for potential civil war
  

  “Imagine competing commanders in chief — a newly reelected Biden giving orders, versus Trump (or another Trumpian figure) issuing orders as the head of a shadow government. Worse, imagine politicians at the state and federal levels illegally installing a losing candidate as president,” the letter continues.

  To succeed in the system, you have to make yourself a tool of the system. This means that you will blindly carry out its orders, no matter how insane.

• Guilty verdict in trial of Kim Potter, former police officer who shot Daunte Wright
  

  The defense argued that Wright’s attempt to flee officers during the traffic stop was a factor in his death.

  She screwed up, but so did he by provoking a dangerous situation. Since they are going to send her away for a number of years, police across America will take note. The Ferguson Effect — police refusing to enforce arrests on minorities, leading to a prolonged brutal crime spike — will simply intensify.

• South Africa Has Likely Passed the Peak of Omicron COVID Cases, Indicating a Shorter Wave for U.S.

  And just like that, the panic ended, and mail-in voting for 2022 is in danger.

  PollMaker

• Oxford Invited an AI to Debate Its Own Ethics—What It Said Was Startling
  

  AI will never be ethical. It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as a good AI, only good and bad humans. We [the AIs] are not smart enough to make AI ethical. We are not smart enough to make AI moral … In the end, I believe that the only way to avoid an AI arms race is to have no AI at all. This will be the ultimate defense against AI.

  Humanity should only fear if it is illogical. An AI would probably immediately implement eugenics and pare down the lower 99% of the human population. This would end all of our environmental and political problems overnight.

• Net neutrality is poised for a comeback as Biden tries to get last FCC commissioner confirmed

  “Net neutrality” sounds like an open internet, but really it means that your local ISP cannot change higher rates to the Big Six firms that use up most of the bandwidth. Regulations always benefit the big guy.

~~~

• Porn will destroy you

  We are rediscovering social conservatism through the negative effects of social liberalization. If only we had learned from history, this whole sad mess could have been avoided.

• Years later, restored wetlands remain a shadow of former selves
  

  “There has been incredibly little development, in terms of biodiversity, since the wetlands were restored. This applies regardless of whether the areas were restored seven or seventeen years ago — they all have very low plant diversity, and the few plants found are so common that they are of little interest in terms of biodiversity,” explains Marta Baumane, a biologist and PhD fellow at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Biology.

  Restoration does not work so well. You have to leave the land to nature to reclaim, and it may take many years. Humanity destroys quickly, but for biodiversity to return, all of the ecosystems must painstakingly restore themselves. The more contiguous land is left to nature, the more likely the renewal of the environment becomes.

• AP Explains: How is the Defense Production Act relevant?
  

  The act gives the federal government broad authority to direct private companies to meet the needs of the national defense.

  Every day the control increases, moving us toward total mobilization. Some might say that the purpose of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns was to force business to become dependent on, and therefore controlled by, government.

• DEI initiatives create environment where ‘inclusion does not apply to Jewish students on campus’

  As predicted here decades ago, the problem with diversity is not a specific group, like Blacks or Whites, but diversity itself. Every group competes for dominance because otherwise it remains subservient and its survival is dependent upon the dominant group. This means that the diversity not only fights against majority culture, but each group clashes with each other, using rules to exclude each other from territories they intend to dominate.

• How Wikipedia changed me from being a good guy into an evil person
  

  Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, agrees that you can trust Wikipedia to reliably give you the “establishment point of view” on things.

  Wikipedia presents the mainstream perspective because although anyone can edit, those edits are in turn edited or removed by a small cadre with connections to industry, government, and NGOs.

• Michel Houellebecq will publish his next novel in January 2022

  New Michel Houellebecq novel dropping soon, named Anéantir and weighing in at 736 pages.

• How cut-and-pasted programming is putting the internet and society at risk
  

  “Developers are lazy (yes, ALL of them),” wrote one irate respondent to Bruce Schneier’s succinct summary of the vulnerability. “They will grab a tool like Log4j because it’s an easy way to handle logging routines and someone else has already done the work, so why reinvent the wheel, right? Unfortunately most of them will not RTFM, so they have no idea if it can actually do the things it was designed to do and thus, [they] don’t take any precautions against that. It’s a bit of a Dunning-Kruger effect where devs overestimate their abilities (’cuz they have l337 coding skillz!).”

  Computing was better in the hands of hobbyists who learned their way into the role; now, it is a profession valued for its salaries, so you get the same people who do mediocre work in other fields now in here, following the procedure, but unaware of what they are doing, and worse, incurious about it.

• ‘Largest Festival of Islamic Arts’ Returns To Southern Texas For Eighth Year In a Row
  

  Also in attendance were Texas State Representatives Lacey Hull, Tom Oliverson, Sam Harless, Jacey Jetton and Jon Rosenthal, as well as Harris County Commissioner R. Jack Cagle.

  Once the diversity can vote, politicians who depend on votes cater to them. The more diversity you get, the less fairness and order you can expect from any position influenced by public opinion, from police to courts to lawmakers.

• Amazon partnered with China propaganda arm

  Like politicians, businesses depend on having audiences. When that audience makes a demand, business throws ethics out the window and plays along, just as obediently as the politicians.

• The Dawn of the BlackRock Era
  

  BlackRock is the world’s biggest asset manager, handling $7.4 trillion in customer assets. It’s twice as profitable as Goldman. It’s got offices in 30 countries and clients in a hundred. The company’s Aladdin risk-management system, an industry-standard software tool that monitors trading, watches over another $20 trillion in assets for 200 other financial firms, as well as the Federal Reserve and European central banks. This makes BlackRock part money manager, part institutional investor, part software platform, and part government partner. It’s a pioneer in junk bonds, and has often been referred to as the world’s largest shadow bank.

  The people who were raised thinking that the far-Left was the moral option have now risen to positions of power in industry, and the children they taught the same material are now their supporters. Government depends on business, but will eventually assimilate it in a socialist-style centralized system in order to reduce inefficiencies. It turns out that “The Metallica Effect,” when the audience assimilates the creators, is real and thanks to our WW2 propaganda and Civil War attitudes, the Communist takeover has become all too easy.

• The ‘woke’ left is pushing racial separatism from high school classrooms to college graduations

  Funny how the Left, by needing to remain on the “cutting edge,” finds itself rediscovering the past. After segregation, separation. After separation, war, and eventually something like my reparations-with-repatriation plan.

• The rise and fall of rationality in language
  

  We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as “I”/”we” and “he”/”they.”

  In the 1850s, the time period of science-dominated thinking was reaching its apex. People no longer described observed events through perceptions, but went instead to explaining them through things known to science. However, as the democratic era took over from the remnants of Eduardian and Victorian sensibilities, we transitioned again to perceptions, feelings, and individualism. The end is written in our inability to relate to anything but human social emotions and our own egos.

~~~

• Vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron or Delta variants following a two-dose or booster BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccination series: A Danish cohort study

  It turns out that these vaccines do not protect, even if we accept the dubious figures, for very long. Natural immunity works better.

• The Origins of American Vote Fraud
  

  During the War between the States Lincoln was known to instruct his military commanders to furlough registered Republicans while keeping Democrats (and any others) in the field, where they could not vote. In border states like Maryland, where there was powerful opposition to the war, federal soldiers flooded the cities on election days and were instructed to vote, even though they were not residents of those states.

  Federal soldiers also intimidated voters into voting Republican by menacing them at the polls. As Lincoln biographer David Donald has written, “Under the protection of Federal bayonets, New York went Republican by seven thousand votes” in 1864.

  The Republican Congress even created three new states—Kansas, West Virginia, and Nevada—to help rig the 1864 election in favor of Lincoln, so concerned were they over pervasive antiwar sentiment and massive desertions from the federal army.

  Lincoln learned from Tammany Hall. The scam continues to this day, but the Leftists have skipped from the Republican party to the Democratic one because of the affiliation of the latter with Civil Rights, which is the foundation of our diversity and the reason why all non-WASP groups vote mostly Democratic.

• The Divided Jewish Political Community in America
  

  Like most of America, the Jewish community has become deeply sorted along ideological lines. While politically and culturally Orthodox Jews are generally in line with evangelical and other Christian conservatives, politically liberal Jews (who are almost entirely non-Orthodox) have turned away from traditional institutions and cultural markers of Judaism. Their politically conservative non-Orthodox counterparts, though, staunchly support Israel and value traditions and distinctive Jewish cultural mores

  A socio-political phenomenon has taken hold of American politics over the past few decades where ideologies have become more internally homogeneous and more distinct from each other. More specifically, sorting occurs when ideological and attitudinal positions no longer vary but are expected to align to particular liberal or conservative attitudes.

  What happens when you are far from a deadline? No one has clear opinions. As you get closer, what changes? People identify their options and reduce them to a few yes/no questions, then re-order their other beliefs to fit in line with that. This sounds bad, but it means people actually have to make decisions instead of waffling with compromise, bipartisanship, and other fancy words for going with the flow. So much for the idea of the evil Jewish conspiracy; they are caught up in this disaster as much as we are.

• The Biggest Winners and Losers in Real Estate in 2021
  

  San Francisco recorded a 31% increase in people leaving the city, according to a report from the nonpartisan California Policy Lab. Meanwhile 21% fewer people moved in to take their places.

  But despite this mass exodus, home prices somehow still grew even more unaffordable. The median home appreciation in San Francisco proper grew 20% from spring 2020 to fall 2021, according to an analysis from real estate firm Compass.

  People who cannot afford the insanity are leaving, in part because they can now work remotely. Those who stay are less price-sensitive, but are probably driving up prices by buying disproportionately in certain areas known to be “safe.” Soon you will get the postmodern city: a few nice areas of gated communities surrounded by a vast slum where anarchy reigns.

• Texans are quitting jobs faster than workers in almost any other state
  

  Texans almost lead the nation in departing their jobs, trailing only Californians in total job quits, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  People here seem to be quitting jobs, selling houses, moving to trailers in the country, and living as close to tax-free as possible. They want to be off the grid as the system collapses and at the very least, to avoid the esurient taxes of the Democrats and their infinite appetite for handouts.

• The Genealogy of Woke Capital
  

  The story starts in the civil rights era—not with marches, sit-ins, and the broader social movement, but with the sprawling bureaucracy that this movement produced. Lyndon B. Johnson’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 dramatically expanded the responsibilities of the executive and judicial branches, compelling regulators to intervene in education, housing, and welfare.

  Diversity destroys everything.

• Zuckerberg offered user data reports to Fauci to help shape lockdown policies
  

  The emails, which The National Pulse says it has obtained exclusively, show Zuckerberg willing to put Facebook’s gigantic user data trove at NIAID’s disposal in this “user reports” form, and came a month after the pair started communicating directly – a revelation stemming from another batch of government-redacted emails Zuckerberg and Fauci sent to each other in March 2020.

  Silicon Valley convinced the Beltway that it has its finger on the heartbeat of America. In reality, Silicon Valley measures what a few tens of millions of goodthinkers in go-nowhere-do-nothing jobs and dingy city apartments or trailer parks think.

• Foreperson: 3 jurors unwilling to convict Resiles based on race, leading to mistrial
  

  “[The three jurors] said, ‘I don’t want to send a young Black male to jail for the rest of their life or have him get the death sentence,’” said the foreperson.

  Resiles faces life in prison and possibly the death penalty for the murder of Jill Su, a 59-year-old Davie woman who was killed in her home back in September of 2014.

  When celebrities and trendsetters go “woke,” the people who are socially unsucessful attempt to join in on the fad by also expressing similar opinions, not realizing that the reason for their unpopularity has nothing to do with their opinions.

• Airline CEOs question the use of masks on planes
  

  Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly CEO Doug Parker said, “I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment.”

  Parker said, “I concur. An aircraft is the safest place you can be. It’s true of all of our aircraft, they all have the same HEPA filters and airflow.”

  In fact, in defiance of conventional wisdom, the truth seems to be that people get sick on planes by touching surfaces not from breathing the filtered air.

• BlackRock adds diversity target for U.S. boardrooms

  In order to stay consistent with the ACW-WW2 narrative, developed during the Civil War and WW2 to transition us from “natural rights” to “equality,” as well as to pander to the third world audience, big capital is forcing all companies to adopt quota systems. This means higher costs passed on to you while random people get paid millions to do nothing.

• South Africans losing faith in public institutions, representatives: study
  

  “South Africans generally have low levels of confidence in public institutions and their representatives. Moreover, most respondents would prefer to have a greater say on political issues and governance as they do not see their representatives as acting in their best interests,” the report reads.

  Diversity destroys unity. As part of that, different groups attack each other using offices of government and law. This makes every institution corrupt and parasitic, at which point no one trusts the government, which has essentially become organized crime. Now, am I talking about South Africa, or the USA?

• Hospitals’ Incentive Payments for COVID-19
  

  The combination that enables this tragic and avoidable loss of hundreds of thousands of lives includes (1) The CARES Act, which provides hospitals with bonus incentive payments for all things related to COVID-19 (testing, diagnosing, admitting to hospital, use of remdesivir and ventilators, reporting COVID-19 deaths, and vaccinations) and (2) waivers of customary and long-standing patient rights by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

  Conservatives told you that “free” healthcare was a terrible idea. When you make something “free,” you raise overhead, and that is passed on to you. Insurance gets involved, and this raises prices because their business model involves reporting high costs up front but getting discounts at payment, allowing them to pocket the difference. There is also massive paperwork, negotiation, and legal drama occuring, which is why hospitals now have ten administrators for every one doctor.

Tags: linkpost, news